


Summer Of Like

by Merkey666



Series: Fourth of Shit [1]
Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: F/M, M/M, Summer of Like, Touring, Warped Tour 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 21:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11365881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkey666/pseuds/Merkey666
Summary: Pete reflecting on Warped Tour of 2005.





	Summer Of Like

**Author's Note:**

> Day one of Fourth of Shit! Did something like for Christmas, which was a bad idea, but here I go again. A fic a day for four day, entitled the Fourth of Shit. Enjoy!

Tour is ending. It’s been a long ass summer, hot in more ways than one, and bloody as hell. It’s been rancid these few months, and I don’t just mean from the way the bus smells. It’s a lot to leave behind, even with your suitcases packed and your plane tickets in your hands. Memories can fade and turn to stone, just like most things do, but memories don’t ever seem to rot. This is good for many reasons, most important being that maybe I’m leaving something behind that’s alive. 

‘Don’t do it Pete, you’ll regret it.’ Tour seemed so endless back then, with countless hours to kiss and lie and sweat and bleed. It all came down to it much quicker than expected and by then I was up to my hips in quicksand. I like to stay above the waist, mostly. But I broke that rule this summer, along with a few others. Most of the other rules I broke were these shitty things called laws, but those aren’t worth my brain power. But summer is gone now, and as it burns me to say it, I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I tried to enjoy it without worrying about the final scene, and now that it’s all played out, it doesn’t seem nearly as bad. Like I said, memories turn to stone, but they don’t rot. They don’t go rancid.

***

It was a good thing that we spent our last night together in his bus, his bunk, his bed, because kicking him out would’ve been so much weirder. I’m not too good at goodbyes, and it’s a skill I still actively try to avoid practicing to this day. Instead of hugging it out and pretending we’d never see each other again, just like if it were a summer camp, I did what I do best. I wrote. The closest thing to me at the time was a sharpie, and thinking back, it was a bad choice. He probably could get it off for weeks. I should’ve used something like lipstick, something less ominous and so uniquely me. But I didn’t think before I wrote, another issue of mine.

Like the tattoos he doesn’t have, ‘goodbye and goodnight’ was inked onto his forearm. With the brain cell killing smell still in my nose, I departed from the bus without saying one word to anyone. That was exactly how I left things. Everywhere I went after that, I stared at my phone. He didn’t text, I honestly wasn’t surprised, but he didn’t call either. I even put forth a placeholder for the amnesty he’d need before he could call me again, but even after that, he didn’t call. We stayed in Massachusetts for a night or so until we took a plane back to Chicago. Patrick didn’t bother to ask why I kept my phone in my palm the entire ride home. 

I could’ve called him instead, but it seemed a little cruel, the give-in being that I was the one to end it. Not only that, but it was a daunting task- having to hear his voice again, if he even picked up at all. After I got back into the swing of things, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the damn phone and dial him up. It took me weeks to finally realize he wasn’t going to call at all. I was okay with that, I’d never really wanted him to call at all. When I ended things, I ended it, for christ’s sake. You don’t break up with someone and then ask them out for coffee three days later. 

Maybe I was initially confused by what it really meant to break up with someone, not that you can even cal what I did “breaking up”. When the summer began, so did a mutual understanding that whatever we did together would come to an end. Someday, no matter how far in the distance, it would all seep back into the Earth and be gone. Forever? Yeah, who knows? There was panic in the air and it came by way of storm, and there was no calm before during or after it. I didn’t know what I wanted from myself, so how could I have known what I wanted from him? Well, I did know what I wanted, even if I took it for granted and didn’t look back until I was home alone with a cold bed. 

I wanted him, for more than a summer. Not to share. Not to sample. Not to go. Somewhere along the lines that I call lust and love the two of us got lost. I didn’t think much of it, and now I know exactly my place. As to where the universe wants me to go, I don’t know or care. But I know where I want to be, and I know who I want. There’s a telephone by me wherever I go, and I never find anything to make me pick it up and call. No strength, courage, misery. No nothing. When we were on tour that thought meant one thing to me, and now it means something else. It used to mean that I didn’t care as much as I thought I did, and now it means that I really do. 

I’m not miserable.

Misery is looking down a storm drain with an empty bottle of pills in your hand and expecting it to be the last thing you see. Misery is your friends kicking down your door, screaming for you to stay. That’s misery. I’ve lived to see sunsets much more beautiful than those I saw on tour, with orange and blue and purple, but those aren’t the kind I like. That’s not the way memories work. There’s something about thinking back to sitting on the roofs of busses until your ass goes numb, watching the sky turn colors until you’re bathed in the dark glow of the nighttime. Sometimes I’d find myself drifting off into the moon, remembering the chill wind on the back of my neck, close to where his lips were. His warm breath against the cold pillow on the bus. Legs tangled up until we were so closely knit, I wasn’t sure we’d ever be free of each other again. I’m still not free of him. But in those moments, those fleeting moments, I wish I could simply call him. These days I wish I’d called him instead of calling it off. 

 

I’m lucky to have never put a dampener on how I make friends. Because there was a time when he and I were friends. It was the kick back and relax, nothing more than friends with a drink in your hand and laughter in your ears. It was clubbing through the night in the back of taxi’s until the stars faded. It was watching each other play and it was playing with each other. Then it was nothing again. We could’ve been nothing, stayed nothing, but I was a light in the dark and he was the dark, or playing the part, and I pulled him down the rabbit hole with me. Or maybe he pulled me, with those brown eyes like siren’s eyes. The kind that pull you off of your pirate ship and into the water. The kind that are on the backs of your eyes even when it’s been months and you’re just trying to get some sleep. 

I find myself in the arms of people I’ve just met, straying farther away from those who love me, and don’t know it yet. Girls with glowing skin and perfect smiles, boys with noses that crinkle when they laugh. It’s not just the bed that’s cold, I’m cold too now. Not physically. It’s the absence of his warmth aura that used to lurk behind me, the bittersweet lip marks and purple bruises we’d leave on each other. Those are gone with the wind, gone when I didn’t pick up that phone. Gone when I wrote on his arm for the last time. Chicago is my home and no city will ever replace it, but the way I felt when I was in his arms was something else. I wasn’t feeling at home, I was content. 

“Bring it,” said the eyes over shoulder smirks, the ones I still give but never receive. The ones that preceded kissing and falling in bed at hotels, or in busses if we were alone. Body talk that still keeps me up during the witching hour. Moaning is a hard language to learn, and he was fluent. No words sound the same, because once you see the epitome of human function, everything else is on the same bland scale. Like I said, it’s like falling off a high.

The goodbyes I give are always so messy, almost like I’m not sure if I mean them. Oh, the bitter irony in that the one I gave him was the only one I never meant. 

I’ve lived a thousand lives with all the things I’ve seen and done. Nothing feels final, like there’s always a way out. I tried the obvious way, more than once, but that didn’t work. I kept waking up in that hospital bed, and the only difference now is that the bed I’m waking up in is my own. And this time I’m not surrounded by friends and family. Feeling the morning sunlight on your skin as fingers dribble down over you is the only way to wake up, and yet it’s the only way I can’t. It occurred to me that maybe I can’t wake up again. Was he a breath of fresh air for me? I wasn’t supposed to breathe him out again, I wasn’t supposed to let go of him. I couldn’t go or stay, both would’ve killed me, and yet I still keep waking back up. In that cold bed of mine. It’s better than the hospital, but irrelevant since I can’t commit to either.

It was good while it lasted and it’s perfect when it hurts. Under the light of the fading stars with the moon’s glow in his sometimes scarlet eyes, the color of love, embedded in his mossy brown. Kissing away the hours in the bunks and the back seats, until my lips went numb and then some. Being in love isn’t something you feel, it’s something you’ve felt. People, myself included, aren’t smart enough to realize when love is in front of your face. Then it passes and you can feel it rising up in your throat and you want it back, like it’s a drug. You want to be back on tour in messy, rancid busses, you want to stick your head out the windows of taxis at one am, you want to write secret messages on arms that aren’t goodbyes. You want things like that. I want things like that. 

It was me and him against the impending death of our love and life. It was the knowledge that we were going down the drain together, intertwined and in love that made it worth it. Flawless isn’t a thing that actually happens. Sometimes I’d think back and wonder just how I would get out of the mess I put myself in, but long fingers holding mine always drew me back in. I could never run away, even if I wanted to. There was always something about the way that he took my hand, like he thought he would break me every time. I realize now I was the same way every time I took him in my arms and laid my lips down on his body, the way it was soft and yet striking enough to matter. The reasons I held so high up were that I knew it wasn’t going to last. LIke I said, I knew it would end. I thought for so long that the credits would come when tour was over, but here I am now, and it’s still revolving around me like the sky. 

You figure everything ends at one point, and I’ll either pick up the phone or I won’t. It’ll kill me not to, and I’ll die if I do. That doesn’t sound too bad, if I can convince him to fall back in love with me. I wonder if he ever fell out of love. You don’t hear that term a lot, but that doesn’t make it invisible. How did I do it before? A wink, a bite of the lip (mine, not his), and entanglement until the birds were growing the greyness out of the early morning light. I can see his lips pressed between his teeth, his dark eyelashes when he looks down to avoid blushing, and the way his body spoke to mine. They had a love of their own, our bodies did. His body worked for mine and mine returned the favour. It’s almost like he thought of me the same way I thought of him. 

He seems so far away, but I’ve driven to every corner of the country with him. Never out of reach, but always out of sight. The way I speak of him is nothing short of a love song waiting to happen, poems waiting to be written, music to combat it. I write tragedies, I write comedies, I write romance, and this is a little bit of all of that. It’s theatrics through the eyes of a survivor of love, the very best type of survivor. Through and through, sad is not how I’d describe my memories. I lived them, and while I miss them, I still have them. And I have a phone too, so I can call. I can relive them if I tried. Dark eyes watching me in even more darkness, the sweat that never dries off of your conscience, and how it sticks to you at all times. I could get my happily ever after, and just because I’m not getting it does not make me sad. 

Damn, I loved him. And when I tour again with the band, sometimes I look over my shoulder to see if he’s waiting for me, and no one notices when I do that. They notice when no one shows up with me. I never noticed what I had, but I notice it now that I miss it. Like I said, that’s how love works. 

You’re wrong. I don’t think about him every moment of my day, I don’t cry when I’m alone at night in my cold bed. Tour is ruined, my friends aren’t ruined. You’re wrong because I got to fall in love, even if it was only for a summer. I got to hold his hand and kiss his face and neck. I got to run my hands over his shaking body in the midnight bliss. I got to watch him play on stage and I got to play with him on stage. I got a best friend. I got to have an ex-friend. I got to have a lover who loved me more than he loved secrecy. I got love. 

Are we all wrong? Tour has been over for months now. I’m going to go on another one soon, amidst my writing of the next album. He’ll take center stage in that one for sure. But I’ll keep part of it in my heart, in my memories, where it’s mine and only mine. Where I can have it for as long as it lasts, summer heat and all. And now that I’ve taken some time away from it all, I can say that I know it didn’t have to end. I never had to write that note. I didn’t have to say goodbye, and maybe if I hadn’t I’d still have him. Maybe I wouldn’t. There’s only way to find out, and it’s in my pocket at all times. I could call him, and we’d fall in love together again. 

And we’d sit on the top of tour busses until our asses go numb, and we’d kiss in the dark and out of sight, and we’d give each other those over the shoulder eyes, and we’d laugh in the back of taxis at one am, and I’d write I love you’s on his arms. Or something like that. It’s been some time, and I think I can ask him out for coffee now. Yet nothing we do from now on will ever replace the summer of like. Nothing will ever replace Mikey Way.


End file.
